Dawn, you hate adoptive parents, don’t you?

Contrary to popular belief, I gave up self-hatred around the same time I quit listening to The Smiths on obsessive repeat and started wearing colors. I don’t hate adoptive parents, obviously, being that I am one and being that there are several besides myself that I quite like (I’ll start with my husband).

But you think all adoptive parents should feel guilty.

I do not want all adoptive parents to feel guilty just like I don’t think all white, straight, middle-class people ought to feel guilty.  But I do think it behooves us to know that most of us don’t come by our successes — even the hard-won successes — without the halo of our unearned privilege. How we choose to acknowledge that privilege and work to end it is up to us but seems like feeling guilty — because I have been known to indulge — ends up being awfully selfish. (It lures us into thinking we’re making change merely by the act of suffering.)

Well, you’re always on the side of first parents!

I’m not the one forcing people to take sides. I come by my beliefs honest — at the knee of my ever-lovin’ feminist mother. And please note that Pennie doesn’t always agree with me. If I were going to change my point of view to try to curry favor with first mothers, she’d be at the top of my list. But — alas — I can’t help but believe what I believe even when it makes me more or less popular.

So do you want kids to rot away in foster care and orphanages without ever having a real home?

Frankly when I write about adoption I’m writing about the particulars of domestic infant adoption. The issues sometimes overlap but are certainly not the same as those found in international adoption and foster-to-adopt. There is a different urgency in foster-to-adopt and in international adoption because in those situations there is a child who needs a home. That’s not to say that this very pressing need negates ethical issues  just that the issues are different and, I think, more complicated.

In any case, in domestic infant adoption there is much more obvious coercion and because the relationships are more direct, there’s more possibility for hopeful adoptive parents to hurt/help the situation.

If you hate adoption so much, why don’t you just give Madison back?

Oh this question! One I’ve heard from pro-adoption and anti-adoption folks alike! Amazing but yes, some of them have something in common (rigidity). Giving Madison back (besides creating a whole host of issues and being based on a whole host of wrong assumptions) would do nothing to solve the issues inherent to domestic infant adoption.

Listen, adoption as a reproductive choice needs to exist. But it’s just not a free and clear choice for most women. As I’ve said zillions of times before, even if a woman is perfectly happy with her decision to place or truly feels it was her best option and even if she feels her agency/attorney did absolutely right by her, there is still a larger system at play that is problematic. Those bigger things at play are what concern me.

Do you think every adoption is bad?

No. I don’t even think every domestic infant adoption is bad. This is complicated but I’m going to give it a whirl. There is a big ugly over-arching system that’s rooted in -isms. Those -isms (racism, classism, heterosexism) create unfair advantages for some of us and unfair disadvantages for others. In adoption some of those -isms are so deeply ingrained that people pretty blithely celebrate some of the things that are most ugly. Domestic infant adoption — as a whole — treats children like commodities and the women who carry them like they’re disposable. But I don’t think every adoption is bad because within this system we are individuals.

I have said a million times that in a perfect world I don’t think adoption would exist (because we could all have our children at exactly the right time in exactly the right circumstances and our families could look any way we liked) but in an imperfect world we need to try harder to be ethical with each other.

Well, why do you have birth mothers on pedestals then?

I don’t. First parents are people — some of them suck and some of them are awesome (you know, just like adoptive parents and other generalized groups of people). I can only tell you that our cultural biases are so enormous that we (collective we) have a tendency to forget the humanity of the people that we (collective we) are keeping down. As a person with a vagina, I have a particular interest in the systemic ways we punish women for being women.

So who is Madison’s real mother?

Madison has two mothers and they are both real. By honoring the truth of Pennie’s motherhood I am not denigrating my own. Having Pennie in her life does not make me any less Madison’s mother. Likewise my active parenting of Madison does not make Pennie any less her mother. This is not a contest. I can see your child’s first mom in your family without missing the truth of you. I can see your joy without ignoring her sorrow. I can acknowledge your gifts without denying hers.

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